Month: September 2007

Bush of Disquiet Anniversary

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A year ago today, I uploaded a project called Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 26-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album.

In the year since the set’s release, the files have been downloaded some 5,732 times as of this writing (9:00pm Pacific Time), according to the Internet Archive (archive.org), where they’re housed — and that thrills me to no end. They’re all available for free download in various formats (192Kbps MP3, 64 Kbps MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3) at:

archive.org/details/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet

Here’s the lineup, with links to the 192Kbps MP3s and to the websites of the contributing musicians:

  1. (MP3) “Help Me Help Me” — AllThatFall
  2. (MP3) “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” — Roddy Schrock
  3. (MP3) “Leftover Secrets to Tell” — Pocka
  4. (MP3) “Secret Life Remix” — Stephane Leonard
  5. (MP3) “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” — (dj) morsanek
  6. (MP3) “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — MrBiggs
  7. (MP3) “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” — john kannenberg
  8. (MP3) “Somebody Help Us” — My Fun
  9. (MP3) “Hey” — Mark Rushton
  10. (MP3) “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” — Prehab
  11. (MP3) “Not Enough Africa” — Ego Response Technician
  12. (MP3) “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — doogie

More info at disquiet.com/bushofghosts. Thanks, again, to all the contributors, including Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), who produced the beautiful “cover” (shown above) and “back cover” for the collection. The project would not have been possible without the instigation of Eno and Byrne, who posted the raw materials of the original songs at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.

Archival Pauline Oliveros MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In both dog years and electronic-music years, the early 1980s is a lifetime ago. That’s when Pauline Oliveros released her Accordion and Voice, an album of insular, searching drones. The Important Records label this year remastered the analog master tapes and rereleased the album on CD. A free download, “Horse Sings from a Cloud” (MP3), has been made available for promotional purposes. On it, she chants like an introspective shaman while her trademark accordion holds long, singular notes and simple chords. Those bellows-powered tones resemble the machine-generated sine waves of an even earlier generation of electronic music, a generation she helped motivate as one of the key figures in the original San Francisco Tape Music Center. More info at importantrecords.com.

Felix Schramm’s Turntable at SFMOMA (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you didn’t snag a flyer on your way into the New Work space at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’d think a plane had crashed through the wall, and somehow the external shell of the building had healed itself.

The artist Felix Schramm, working with a set of constraints imposed by SFMOMA, has filled much of several upstairs galleries with Sheetrock constructions that force their way through one space and into the next. The result is like one of Lebbeus Woods’ impossible architecture drawings made real.

That piece is titled “Collider.” Schramm has one other sculpture on display: “Soft Corrosion” (2006), a busted hemisphere of wood and plaster, within which is placed a functioning turntable. (Photography isn’t allowed at SFMOMA; the following image is scanned from a handout made available at the museum.)

On that turntable is a record, which rotates at 16rpm to what SFMOMA curator Aspara DiQuinzio describes as an “irregular eclipse,” owing to a second, off-center hole that Schramm has punched into the vinyl. The record is Guitarrenträume in Gold, a collection of sentimental guitar melodies including “House of the Rising Sun” and “My Darling Clementine.” When I visited this past weekend, the player had already locked into the groove at the center of the record, and it didn’t so much fill the room as accent it with a low rumble of surface noise. DiQuinzio says in the handout, “The sound distortion heightens the experience of spatial disorientation that is central to Schramm’s overall practice.” With a mind to the chance inherent in Schramm’s constrained spatial and sonic play, DiQuinzio opens the handout with a full John Cage mesostic poem, based on the word “circumstances.”

There’s more going on technologically in “Soft Corrosion” than just a turntable hooked up to a speaker. A fairly complex bunch of electrical cords is packed inside the wood semi-circle, including an exposed bit of circuit board that turns the power to the record player on and off every minute or so.

Just down the hall from the Schramm is the entrance to a massive retrospective of related paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse. The proximity might seem incongruous, even jarring, did the Matisse exhibit not open with this 1951 quote from the master: “I did not sculpt like a sculptor. Sculpture does not say what painting says. Painting does not say what music says. They are parallel ways, but you can’t confuse them.”

The Schramm is open through September 30. More info at sfmoma.org. I’ll be headed back at least once before the exhibit closes. Every day at 10am, noon, 2pm and 4pm someone resets the “Soft Corrosion” needle to the start of the record album.

Tangents (Shuffle, Cage, plasma)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, Shuffle, published by the Aperature Foundation. It contains 75 cards, each a photo that Marclay has shot of some musical notation out in the world: on a hat, a tattoo, suspenders, etc.

By the way, if you’re near Oakland this coming weekend, musicians will be, per Marclay’s suggestion, playing Shuffle as if it were intended notation on Friday, September 7, at the 21 Grand. Damon Smith organized; participants will include Aurora Josephson, Weasel Walter, Jacob Lindsay, Phillip Greenlief and Kristian Aspelin (21grand.org).

News, Quick Links, Good Reads: There’s 24 hours and 33 minutes of John Cage airing on WYNC from Wednesday, September 5, at 12PM until 12:33PM on September 6th. It’s streaming at wnyc.org. That’s 24’33” — get it? … Sound-activated clothes designed by Tomoko Ueyama (engadget.com), sound-based search engine (engadget.com), multi-touch interface innovations from the Jazzmutant folks (engadget.com), a USB drive resembling a cassette tape (engadget.com), a potential guitar controller for the DS edition of Guitar Hero III (engadget.com). … Audio-recognition research from Google (googleresearch.blogspot.com). … The CD turned 25 on August 17 (slashdot.org, cnn.com). … The 12k record label, run by Taylor Deupree, has launched a forum (12k.com/forum). … Useful tips on how to get music on and off your iPod (howto.wired.com); I can recommend the YamiPod software (yamipod.com). … R.I.P. Tony Wilson, Foundry Records head (Joy Division, New Order), Hacienda founder (news.bbc.co.uk).

Score Keeper: The website of Clint Mansell (clintatthecontrols.com) has gone dark; according to Network Solutions it “expired on 08/11/2007 and is pending renewal or deletion.” … Charlie Clouser (Nine Inch Nails cohort) is on a fairly consistent roll: Death Sentence, Dead Silence, Resident Evil: Extinction and Saw IV (he did the first three,too). … Cliff Matinez is on Stiletto. … I’ve added a set of links to the Disquiet.com Elsewhere page that lead to the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) entries for film-music composers with a penchant for underscoring (disquiet.com/elsewhere).

Fellow Travelers: How did Rick Rubin improve hip-hop in the mid-1980s? “Before Def Jam, hip-hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook. … Those songs didn’t deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form” (nytimes.com). … Art stars the Starn twins moving to sound art? “Some day we hope to make it talk,” they say of one of their large-scale photo projects. “Plasma makes a great speaker”(nytimes.com). … According to the September 2007 issue of Vibe: Notch (born Normal Darnell Howell, of the duo Born Jamericans): “I drive to clear my mind. The best place to drive is the turnpike in Miami ’cause the sky looks like Windows XP”; Corbin Bleu of High School Musical: “A lot of music comes to me on the plane — it’s the hum of the engine. The other strange place is … a lot of movie ideas come to me in the shower. I sit there, let the water run on me, and procrastinate. I guess there’s something about a continuous noise.”

Heavy Rotation: Pauline Oliveros‘ Accordion and Voice, dating from the early 1980s, reissued by Important, in all its droney glory. … Galactic‘s latest, From the Corner to the Block, teams the group largely with rappers, which means it uses its updated take on New Orleans party jazz to fill the space where loops and beats might have been; the highlight is an exception: “Bounce Baby,” featuring DJ Z-Trip … Disquiet.com Downstream of the week: a you-are-there field recording by Cabaret Voltaire‘s Chris Watson (disquiet.com, MP3).

Banks Violette Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Among the individuals responsible for bringing drones into the modern museum, one key one is Banks Violette, who has collaborated with black metal musicians from Scandinavia and with the band Sunn O))’s Stephen O’Malley in the construction of installations that combine painting, sculpture and sound. The PS1 podcast series, broadcast from the Queens-based arts center, has an old interview with him in which he discusses how the audio complements his physical structures, how MFA programs prepare (for better and worse) students for the art world, and how youthful indiscretion may be the most potent cultural detritus of all (MP3).